It is a time of fear in the face of freedom, a time of an emptying country and swelling cities, a time for the widening of previous roads and the opening of new paths, yet a time when these paths are mined by knowing algorithms of the all-seeing eye. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection. These are the times when maps fade, old landmarks crumble and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread. Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.

Workplace Equality by Sexual Orientation: Senate Democrats Match American Public

Given that the nation just finished celebrating Labor Day, it’s a good time to check in on the progress of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, S. 811 in the United States Senate. The legislation would ban discrimination in the workplace on the basis of sexual orientation (except for employers that have a religious mission or have fewer than 15 workers).

Generations At Odds, a report released last week by the Public Religion Research Institute, indicates that 71 percent of Americans support legal protections for gay and lesbian workers of the sort provided for in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. That kind of high level of support for a cause should lead to passage of legislation in a democracy, yet the Senate has not acted.

The Senate is currently controlled by the Democratic Party – though by a slim margin. Could it be that the Senate Democrats are out of touch with American opinion, leaving the Employment Non-Discrimination Act in the lurch? I suspected that this might be the case, and so I checked the list of cosponsors for the legislation.

It turns out that the Senate Democrats are quite representative of the opinion of the American people on the issue of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. 71 percent of Americans support workplace protections like those included in the legislation, and 72 percent of Senate Democrats have signed their names in support of the bill.

The Senate Republicans, on the other hand, are profoundly out of sync with American opinion. While 71 percent of the American public supports the cause of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, only 8 percent of Republican senators do.

This pattern indicates that, at least in terms of labor issues and gender equality, the Senate is strongly out of balance. While the Republicans in the Senate are promoting a hard right wing position that’s far beyond popular American opinion, the Democrats are not counterbalancing the GOP agenda. The Senate Democrats are occupying a centrist position, not a position that’s to the left of American opinion.

The effect is that the Senate, though formally controlled by the Democratic Party, is ideologically dominated by the Republicans and their right wing agenda. A right wing position has become the default in the Senate, even though that political position is not in accord with the values of the American opinion.

If this dynamic holds true across other issues, then the solution for bringing the U.S. Senate into alignment with the American people needs to be the creation of an effective political party on the left. The left is the missing piece in politics on Capitol Hill.

In this context, efforts by groups like Americans Elect and No Labels to create a new centrist political party are redundant and unlikely to succeed. Why would American voters flock to a new centrist political party, when the Democratic Party already occupies that position?

What’s truly missing is a reasonable, well-organized liberal political party. The challenge in constructing such a party isn’t ideological. It’s organizational. Liberals reject the corporate money that’s built up the Republican Party. Working Americans could, if they all chipped in a little bit, get a reasonable balance of cash and volunteer labor behind a liberal party.

The problem is that working Americans are living through rough economic times. Because the American federal government has been taken over by a center right coalition of Republicans and Democrats, without a liberal party to balance the system, policies have systematically redirected wealth from workers to corporations and their wealthiest investors. The economic dynamic that excludes liberals from American politics is thus circular, and won’t change unless liberal activists are able to come up with an effective new mechanism for political organization that doesn’t rely on financial donations.

So what good is a government that doesn’t protect its citizenry (to the advantage of the few) while itself being the arbiter of just what constitutes corruption (or what needs investigating and then legislating on)?

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